Aerie

The Thing lashed out against the four attackers with bolts of lightning. Somehow they evaded these, and returned the favor with balls of light, great gouts of flame, and some lightning of their own. For Peri, it was impossible to sort out who was doing what, the sky was too full of light, the air too full of thunder.

The ground shook with the force of their exchange.

She felt a hand seize her shoulder and shake it, and turned to find Huras kneeling beside her. It gave her some small measure of comfort to see that he looked as terrified as she felt. “Peri!” shouted Huras over the sound of the unearthly battle. “Peri, what’s going on? Where are Kiron and the others?”

Hands glowing with dark power seized both their shoulders and pulled them to their feet. “What do you think is going on, Children of Alta?” shouted the one who held them.

He, too, must have once been a man; his eyes were bandaged, and he wore the robes of a priest and a coronet with the image of Seft’s Scorpion. But he moved as surely as a sighted man, and his face was full of that same terrible glory as the others. It burned in his regard, it invested every word, and every tiniest gesture.

He did not wait for them to answer.

“The gods war to put back what should never have been released,” he continued, shouting over the howl of the wind and the crashing and booming of strike and counterstrike.

Huras seized their captor’s hand. “Is that Thing a goddess?” he shouted.

“Not yet, you mortal children of the Two Kingdoms. Not yet,” the being shouted back, with a bitter laugh. “Foolish, foolish mortals—the Heyksin being fools, and not you—as below so above, the wretched Heyksin wanted a God of Vengeance, and so they strove to create one in their own image. Look at it!” he continued, flinging out an arm, and the power behind his words forced Peri to look back up at the raging battle, and at the dreadful Thing that was the center of it. “Look at it! Do you think for one moment that something like that is going to go quietly away when this battle is over?”

Numbly, Peri shook her head, sheltering her eyes with one hand from the wind.

“Wiser than they, you are. Of course it won’t. If we lose here, it will not be content with that! It will remain manifest and demand blood and blood and still more blood, and it won’t be the blood of bulls it calls for.” The Being let them go. “The blood of men made it, and the blood of men is what it feeds upon. And one must fall to bind it again.”

But he gave Huras a push. “You! There is another battle being fought, and it is mortal against mortal. Gather your Jousters, Huras of Alta! Strike now, while the enemy is as befuddled as you! It will serve you ill if the Gods win their battle, only for the mortals they serve to lose theirs!”

Huras did not hesitate for a moment. He turned and ran for the edge of the cliff, leaving Peri standing before——before a god.

Kaleth and Marit were chanting, lost deep inside ritual and magic. Essentially, Peri was alone with this god. Seft. Seft the Dark, Seft the Liar, Seft the Betrayer.

She turned her eyes back toward the four who hung in the midst of Light and Darkness. “Kiron—” she whispered, without thinking. What were her dreams in the face of something like this?

What had her dreams ever been—when he could become—a god?

“He does not love you,” the Being said flatly, without emotion. “Here and now, in this place and time where will can become manifest, there must be Truth. And he does not love you. He was being kind to you, nothing more.”

She felt tears spring up in her eyes, and turned to the Being angrily. “You cannot know that!”

“Oh, I can, and I do. If he had loved you, it would be you up there beside him, wearing the diadem of Hattar, and not Aket-ten.”

Her eyes stung, and her cheeks burned. But she could not deny what she saw. With a little mew of despair, she turned away. The Being seized her shoulders and shook her.

“Fool!” he snapped. “Look higher than the mud at your feet! Look at the Truth in you! You do not love him either. You love a dream of what you thought he was! The lies you hold give That thing power! You blundered into the place of power, and you can overset Us or aid Us by what you are! Now give over the pretty lie, and give Us your strength! Be strong, as strong as the one who survived the loss of all! Be strong as you do not yet realize you are! That thing came to life on the will of her worshippers—she is everything that they are writ large across the sky—now you are in this place of power—serve the same purpose for us!”

Shocked into silence, she looked, since she could not look into his eyes, at his mouth.

Why me? was her first thought. But he had answered that. She had stumbled inside a place of magic. He had said that “will became manifest” here. If she persisted in her illusions——would that weaken the bond between the Haras and Hattar that battled above her head?

She knew the answer before the question finished forming. Yes.

And if that happened—

“Any weakness, that Thing can exploit!” the Being said ruthlessly, giving her another shake. “Any doubt feeds her, any despair aids her. Face the Truth! Give Us your strength! Be strong, and become their channel to help us!”

He does not love you. That was hard, hard to face. But . . . you do not love him—that was . . .

Truth.

She felt something turn inside her, as she faced her innermost self and saw—the Truth. She . . . she had wanted, not love but . . . protection. She had wanted to be dependent on someone else. For all that she had joined the Queen’s Wing, for all that she had taken on responsibilities there—she had wanted, in her heart of hearts, to be told what to do. To be taken care of. Had wanted her story to end in some vision of unrealistic harmony, where nothing ever went wrong, where she and—this vague man-shaped image—never quarreled, never differed, never experienced the least little bump in their unending contentment. A storyteller’s ending . . . and they lived happily until the end of their days.

And in that storyteller’s tale of a life, she would tend to this image’s every want, serving as a faithful priestess, and in turn, being protected and told exactly what to be, what to do, what to think, in return for this fat, stupid, sheeplike contentment.

That was what she had been in love with. Not a man. Not even a dream of a man. And not a woman’s dream, but the dream of a child, lost and bereft, wanting only someone who would make her safe.

False and hollow, all of it. She was no longer that child, and safety was always an illusion.

She felt the fragments of falsehood falling away from her, like bits of a dragon’s shed skin as she slowly straightened her back.

There was no safety in the world. This Thing howling and fighting above her head should tell her that. Contentment was for cattle and sheep—who were used, herded, and then slaughtered, never knowing the reason why.

Freedom was not safe. Love, if and when it did come, was not safe. Life was not safe, it was full of brawling and strife and terror and pain—and love and joy and bravery and passion.

She could choose to be a sheep, or a dragon. A child, or a responsible adult.

Without even being aware of starting to move, she found herself joining the priest Kaleth and his consort.

If the gods needed her will, her strength, then by all that was holy, they would have it. And it was more than time to grow up.

TWENTY

THE Jousters of Alta and Tia rained down jars of Akkadian Fire on the heads of the Heyksin.

That was a kind of strength that poured into those who wore the mortal shells of Jousters themselves. The Jousters believed that their Gods would overcome this abomination that the Heyksin had created and that bolstered the battle going on above their heads. As below, so above. Belief.

That, at least, was what Marit told Peri, as she paused for a precious drop of water to moisten a throat gone hoarse with chanting.

Peri could not watch the battle above; not because she was afraid—though she was—but because she couldn’t see anything of what was going on, amid a maelstrom of fire and lightning and glare. And even if she could